These horrors were not accidents. At the Yalta summit in February 1945, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden had accepted Stalin’s demand that every Soviet citizen in Allied hands be repatriated, willing or not. The Americans, after initial resistance, fell in line. As part of Operation Keelhaul and related handovers, nearly 3 million men, women, and children were forced across the lines. To Stalin, they were all traitors. Many were executed on the spot; countless others vanished into the gulag. In Murmansk, witnesses described repatriated Soviet prisoners being herded into warehouses, followed by the rattle of automatic fire and trucks carrying away the bodies.
Even at the time, some Americans recognized the enormity of what was happening. Eleanor Roosevelt, who was deeply involved in the refugee crisis, warned in January 1946: “A new type of political refugee is appearing — people who have been against [their] present governments and if they stay at home or go home will probably be killed.”
For decades, the story of this betrayal remained buried, concealed behind euphemisms in official records. But beginning in the 1970s, historians such as Nikolai Tolstoy exposed what had occurred: The democracies that had just defeated Hitler agreed to deliver millions of defenseless refugees into the hands of another murderous dictator.
That was 1945. But it was not the first time the United States and its allies betrayed those who believed they would be safe in the West. Six years earlier, nearly a thousand German Jews fled the Third Reich aboard the St. Louis. They reached the coast of Florida in June 1939 and begged for refuge. President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration refused them entry. Barred from disembarking at Miami, the ship’s passengers returned to Europe, where they were dispersed to Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Britain. When Hitler’s armies overran Western Europe the following year, many of the St. Louis refugees were caught again in the Nazi net. More than 250 were murdered in the Holocaust.
Thus in 1939 and in 1945, the pattern was the same: Instead of granting sanctuary, America consigned refugees back to the tyranny they had fled.
It is repeating that betrayal yet again in 2025.
As law professor Ilya Somin wrote last week in Reason, citing new revelations in The Times of London, the Trump administration has been deporting Russian dissidents who fled Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship. On Aug. 27, less than two weeks after President Trump’s summit with Putin in Alaska, dozens of Russians were rounded up and forced onto planes. Among them was a 27-year-old defector from Moscow’s savage war in Ukraine, today facing a decade in prison — or conscription back to the front line.
That was not an isolated incident. According to The Times, the first mass deportation of the Russian exiles this year occurred in June, when US officials put 47 people on a flight to Egypt, where they were forced to board a plane for Moscow. In August, as many as 60 additional Russian refugees were sent back by the same route. Upon arriving in Moscow, the deportees’ American asylum files — containing detailed statements of their opposition to Putin — were handed over to the Russian authorities.
As Somin notes, this policy began under Joe Biden, who allowed smaller-scale deportations of Russians back to Moscow. But under Trump it has intensified, both in numbers and in ferocity. Washington is today frankly cooperating with Putin’s secret police in the persecution of political dissidents. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an exiled former oligarch who was once Russia’s most famous political prisoner, underscores how chillingly diabolical this is: America is not only sending critics of Putin back to Russia but turning them over together with evidence that can be used to fabricate criminal cases against them.
“This is no longer about democratic leadership,” Khodorkovsky told The Times. “It’s about the risk of being seen as an ally of dictators.”
Nor is it only Russian dissidents who have been betrayed. Cubans and Venezuelans fleeing communist repression, Iranian Christians fleeing religious persecution, Afghan allies who risked their lives to aid American forces — all have learned that the United States will sometimes send the oppressed not to safety but back to their oppressors. The details differ, but the essence is the same: When America sacrifices principle to political or diplomatic expediency, the cost is paid in broken lives and broken faith.
Morally, there could hardly be a greater inversion of our national creed. To return refugees to certain persecution is a clear violation of the principle of non-refoulement under international human rights law, as well as of every humane instinct. It makes a mockery of America’s self-image as a haven of liberty. It is wicked to betray the defenseless, grotesque to deliver them, bound and documented, to the very tyrants they opposed. A nation that behaves so dishonors itself.
Strategically, the folly is just as clear.
Refugees from tyranny are not a burden but an asset. Russians fleeing Putin often bring education, technical skills, and entrepreneurial drive; keeping them strengthens us, deporting them strengthens him. For dictators, every dissenter forced home is a propaganda victory, proof that the “free world” cannot be trusted. For our friends, each betrayal corrodes faith in American promises. Afghans who fought beside US troops and then saw their families left behind have learned to their sorrow the cost of trusting America. Why would the next generation of allies risk their lives for a country so quick to abandon those who rely on it?
America’s enemies may find us dangerous. But our friends too often find us fatal. Each act of betrayal — in 1939, in 1945, today again in 2025 — diminishes not only our honor but our strength. To consign refugees back to the regimes they fled is to help our adversaries, weaken ourselves, and abandon the very ideals that make freedom worth defending.
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Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jeff.jacoby@globe.com. Follow him on X @jeff_jacoby.
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